Breaking Blue

by Timothy Egan

  She had first met Clyde when he moved into 365 First Avenue; it seemed so long ago she could not remember exactly when the Ralstins had come to town. Olive hired him to build a sun room, expanding a porch and covering it. A superb carpenter, reliable, steady, and meticulous, Clyde was a magician with circular saw and hammer. And he was charming, chatty; he certainly never made a pass at Mrs. Wehr or went into a gallop of foul language. “He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word,” she said. “He stands for the right things.”

  After work, Clyde and Olive would sip lemonade and watch the golden light on the western flank of the Mission Range. He talked about the adventures of his life—the days in South America, the war period at Hanford, the years as a judge at the Nez Percé Reservation. “Once in a while he’d bring up something about his being a detective,” she said. “But there was nothing shameful, nothing scandalous. He told me he was quite a good policeman, is what I remember.”

  As veterans discuss the war that scarred them for life, Olive and Clyde would sometimes talk about the Great Depression and what it did to them. They knew it was something that could not be understood by their children, or friends from a younger generation. You simply had to live through it—the humility, hunger, and long nights without hope, the dollar-a-day jobs, the lines for soup, the unheated rooms on winter nights—to understand what it did to people. A teacher in the 1930s, Olive was not paid in money; rather, at the end of her work period she was given a ration of scrip, which she would take to local farmers and redeem for food.

  “It seemed to us that life just stopped during the Depression,” said Olive. “It brought out the best and it brought out the worst in everybody.” Given the times, was it not possible that Clyde could kill another man over food? Olive had thought about this question since the whispered stories of Clyde’s awful past first came into town in mid-spring.

  After much rumination, she had settled on an answer. She told about a rock in Saint Ignatius the size of a house, a remnant from an Ice Age glacier as it gouged its way north. Nobody asks about the rock or how it got there, said Olive Wehr. The neighborhood was built around it. Everybody accepts it for what it is.

  BETTY BAMONTE was late for work and looking for something at home in Metaline Falls. She went downstairs to the first floor of the brick building and started rummaging through a stack of papers next to her husband’s master’s degree project. Looking at the completed thesis, she thought of how she had been left out of the recent triumphs. He used to talk nonstop about how excited he was to be stirring up the past. If she let him, he would jabber on till dawn. On many nights, even after she kissed him and told him to put the project out of his head and go to sleep, his mind kept racing, and she shared the thumping heart. The entire bedroom seemed to pulse with his restless mind. As the initial breakthroughs came, she was the first to know; Tony rushed the information to her like a kid running home from school with his best report card. She was a partner in discovery. But in recent weeks, she learned of developments—the existence of Clyde Ralstin, the complete story of Pearl Keogh—from reading the newspaper. She felt no closer to her husband than the average subscriber might feel.

  A section of computer paper buried in a stack on Tony’s desk caught her eye. Betty saw these words, in big letters spat out by the automated printer:

  XXOO LINDA LOVES TONY

  She stared at the paper in disbelief.

  XXOO LINDA LOVES TONY

  Was this what those Thursday nights in Spokane were all about? The reason he couldn’t look her in the face without turning away? Why he no longer asked the basic questions about the structure of her day?

  She caught her breath, forcing the air out slowly. Now she was gasping; the oxygen had left the room. She didn’t care what happened to him now, if he ever came home or lived or died. If he returned to Metaline Falls today, she would not let him in this house. She would throw everything of his in a bag and tell him to be gone, off to some fleabag room down the road, where he belonged—out, out, out! When the flash of anger passed, she started to cry, alone with the hollowed-out feeling of the betrayed.

  XXOO LINDA LOVES TONY

  She threw the paper down. Work beckoned, but she could not move just yet. She sat, buried her head in her hands.

  BAMONTE COULD FIND no one in Saint Ignatius who had heard Clyde Ralstin mention anything about the Conniff killing. Instead, he found himself nearly drowning in a reservoir of good feeling for the old man. And how dare the sheriff insinuate that he might have been mixed up with police corruption and a cop killing!

  Mike Walrod, the undersheriff, was one of the few people in town who had seen another side to Clyde. The old man had a hot temper, he said, which caused some people—Indians, without money or options, who lived in his apartments—to fear him. Still, Walrod was confident that Ralstin would talk to the law. “He was a cop, he used to talk to me about it,” said Walrod. “He would say, ‘I sympathize with your job, ’cause I know how it works.’ ”

  That night, staying in a small roadside motel outside town, Bamonte wondered if perhaps he was going after the wrong man. The last thing he wanted was to hound an innocent person to his grave. But as he sifted through the evidence, he arrived at the same conclusion as before: everything pointed to Ralstin. Even if he had lived somewhat of an exemplary life since the killing, he still had to answer for September 1935.

  In the morning, Bamonte went to the Lake County sheriff’s office; it was time to face Ralstin. Mike Walrod was planning to go with Bamonte to Ralstin’s house. But just as the two cops were leaving, a phone call came.

  “A lawyer on the line for you, Sheriff Bamonte.”

  Bamonte picked up the phone. An attorney, Philip J. Grainey, somewhat ubiquitous in western Montana, with offices in two towns and a practice that stretched over an area bigger than most states, identified himself as Clyde Ralstin’s attorney, hired to represent him in the Conniff investigation.

  “I didn’t know he had a lawyer,” Bamonte said.

  “He does.”

  “We’re on our way to Ralstin’s house right now,” the sheriff said. “Would you like to meet us there?”

  “My client doesn’t want to talk.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said he doesn’t want to talk. It wouldn’t be right for him. Not now.”

  “What do you mean, he doesn’t want to talk? He was a cop. I’m a small-town sheriff. Why shouldn’t one cop help another? I’m just looking for a few answers.”

  “Can you come to my office?” Grainey asked.

  “I’d rather talk to Clyde.”

  “What … exactly what have you got on him, Sheriff? What sort of case? Maybe we can talk about something.”

  “Let’s talk to Clyde first.”

  “My client hired me … to represent his best interests. And his best interest now is that he would rather not discuss this case.”

  “Why not? If he’s innocent, what’s to hold him back?”

  “He has the legal right to remain silent.”

  And as Bamonte heard the basic speech he’d heard hundreds of times, his doubts of the night before vanished. He wanted to sit face-to-face with Ralstin—close enough to see him sweat, to watch him quiver, to lock old eyes with young eyes—and ask him what happened to his .32 revolver, the one that he reported missing when he left the police department in 1937, and what he was doing at a roadblock one hour after the shooting, and why Acie Logan would have named Clyde as the shooter, and what Virgil Burch was talking about when he told Pearl Keogh the same thing in 1940.

  “Come out to my office,” said Grainey. “We can talk there.”

  Walrod could not believe Clyde was refusing to cooperate. “Let me call him.” He dialed Ralstin at home, spoke to him for a few minutes, then hung up.

  “He won’t talk,” said Walrod, greatly surprised. “Told me he had nothing to say. Said we should see his attorney. Makes you wonder.”

  BAMONTE DROVE twenty-five miles north to the town of Ron
an, a hamlet that seemed, even more than Saint Ignatius, to be overwhelmed by the great wall of the Mission Mountains. He felt as if he had been squeezed among the ages and dropped between two curtains of granite.

  Grainey was polite and to the point. He said Ralstin had hired him after the stories started coming out of Spokane. Clyde had no criminal record, the attorney said, and had lived a fine life, as far as he knew. He had very little time left on this earth. His family was deeply upset by this … encumbrance from the Pend Oreille. Why would the sheriff want to bother an old man?

  For one thing, Bamonte explained, the marshal’s murder remained an unsolved homicide, and he had a legal duty to investigate any leads. Secondly, even if the case never made it to a courtroom, Bamonte owed it to the Conniff family, Olive and Mary and George junior, to follow through with what he had started. Finally, he had a scholarly interest in the case.

  Grainey nodded. The moral posturing concluded, the attorney cleared his throat. “Are you going to arrest him today?”

  “Arrest him?”

  “Yes. He thinks you’re going to arrest him.”

  “Why is that? I mean … if he’s done nothing wrong, why does he think I’m going to arrest him?”

  “All this business in the papers.”

  “I want to talk to him,” Bamonte said. “I’ve got a few questions.”

  “What have you got on him?” Grainey said.

  Bamonte was not prepared to lay out his entire case, but he wanted to show the attorney enough to coax him into cooperating. The sheriff produced a copy of the two Sonnabend interviews, in which Acie Logan named Ralstin as the killer and the leader of the gang of butter thieves.

  “Sonnabend—he’s dead, isn’t he?” Grainey asked.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then what are we supposed to make of this? Hearsay.”

  Bamonte showed part of the transcript of an interview with Dan Mangan. “Mangan knew Clyde pretty well,” said the sheriff. “Worked sixteen years at SPD. Left as a sergeant. Had a place not too far from here, at Hungry Horse. The Dam Town Tavern. Said Clyde used to come up for drinks.”

  “Yes …”

  “Told me about the gun. Look.” He showed Grainey a section of the transcript of the interview with Mangan. “Said they threw it over the bridge to cover for Clyde.”

  “And why would he do that?”

  “Clyde had something on him. Had something on just about everybody in the department.”

  “Mangan—he’s still alive?”

  “He is.”

  “You didn’t find the gun?”

  “No, it’s … We did not.”

  “This doesn’t prove a thing. These are not sworn statements.”

  Bamonte opened his briefcase and took out a small tape recorder. He slapped a tape inside and pressed the play button. “Listen to this.”

  What Grainey heard was the scratchy voice of Pearl Keogh, recounting her days at Mother’s Kitchen, finding butter wrappers from the Newport Creamery just days after it was robbed.

  “And this.” He sped the tape up to the part where Pearl recounted the dinner-table boast of Virgil Burch, the one in which he said Clyde Ralstin sprayed the marshal’s body full of lead, and that their only regret was that they had to leave the creamery before picking up all the dairy products they wanted.

  Grainey, accustomed to dealing with the banalities of small-town legal work in the late twentieth century—the divorces and wills, the petty crimes and drunk drivers, the trespasses and title disputes—had never heard a story so rustic and foreign.

  “Sonnabend may be dead,” said Bamonte. “But this lady, Pearl Keogh, is alive.” He turned off the tape recorder. “And she’ll testify if we ask her to.”

  “You don’t have enough to charge Mr. Ralstin,” Grainey said. “Do you?”

  “That’s not up to me,” Bamonte said.

  Grainey asked about physical evidence—fingerprints, butter wrappers, a weapon, anything to place the former detective at the crime scene.

  “We have some loose ends,” Bamonte said. “But if you let me see him, I’m sure he can clear everything up.”

  “Sheriff, this was fifty-four years ago. You can’t expect him to remember.”

  “I just want to ask him a few things.”

  Grainey was adamant: His client would not discuss any part of the Conniff case with Sheriff Bamonte. It was, he reiterated, Ralstin’s legal right to remain silent.

  Now more than ever, Bamonte felt convinced Ralstin was his man. “Did you ask him about this?” Bamonte said.

  “He’s never heard of Conniff. Doesn’t remember anything about the case.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Bamonte said. “Memory.”

  “He doesn’t have to talk to you, Sheriff.”

  “If he’s innocent,” Bamonte said, “he’s got nothing to hide. He’s supposed to be such a great supporter of the law. Just let me sit down with him. Straighten this thing out.”

  Grainey was insistent. “If you try to talk to him, it might kill him.”

  “I thought—”

  “He is a frail old man. He has a bad heart. He suffers from internal bleeding. This whole matter has weakened him. I’m afraid an interrogation might just be too much for him.”

  “Too much?”

  “Yes. You know what I mean.”

  “How sick is he?”

  “He has trouble breathing. He can’t exert himself for long without shortness of breath. He just wants all this to go away.”

  “It’s not going to go away,” Bamonte said.

  “You don’t have enough to charge him. And you say you’re not here to arrest him. Well then, Sheriff, what do you want from this dying old man?”

  Bamonte gathered up his papers and his tape recorder. He rose, thanked Grainey for his time, and made his way to the door.

  “You tell him I know all about this,” the sheriff said. “Tell him I know what he did. Make sure he understands you. Tell him I know.”

  20.

  Retreat

  THE SHERIFF left Montana in the afternoon, feeling frustrated. The friends and protectors of Clyde Ralstin had urged him to pack up his story and never return. The sky matched his mood: flat-bottomed clouds skidded across the top of the Mission Range, edging east. It had been bright and warm in the morning, but now the sun was gone, and Bamonte could see fresh snow near the summits. Occasionally, some shafts broke through the cloud cover, very dramatic, two-mile-long beams spotlighting parts of Saint Ignatius. For a few seconds, he saw the light sweep over the ancient brick sheathing of the church. Outside, a priest handed out copies of an Indian prayer to visitors. The last verse of the prayer, handed down by elders of the Flathead tribe, went like this:

  Oh, Great Spirit,

  Make me always ready to come to you

  With clean hands and straight eyes.

  So when life fades, as the fading sunset,

  My spirit may come to you without shame.

  Inside the church, behind the main altar, were three panels, a triptych depicting visions that had changed the life of Saint Ignatius, the Spanish nobleman who founded the order of Catholic priests known for their intellect and political skills. Above the triptych was a mural of the Last Judgment, with the face of a benevolent-looking God staring down on those lesser beings awaiting his word.

  Like those mortals in Brother Carignano’s mural, Clyde Ralstin now sought redemption. His friends said the old man, never known as a very religious person, was evoking God of late. Ralstin told one visitor that it was not up to the sheriff from Pend Oreille to decide if he had lived a just life or should escape judgment for distant sins. “It is between God and I,” he said.

  Still, Bamonte wanted some lesser authorities in his county to have a chance at handing out earthly justice before Ralstin moved on. He felt alone, on a limb with the investigation. His prosecutor had not been much support of late. Bamonte wondered if he should drop it.

  Driving west, Bamonte was troubled b
y one of Crainey’s contentions, the notion that any further investigation—particularly an interrogation of the suspect—might cause too much stress, enough to kill Ralstin. The sheriff could be held responsible, Grainey had said, if something awful were to happen to his client, some sudden deterioration in his condition. What’s more, if dredging up Clyde’s past hastened his trip to the grave, the moral burden would be on Bamonte. Did the sheriff want that on his conscience? Bamonte considered this an odd transference of blame. What happened on September 14, 1935, belonged to Ralstin; Bamonte was a messenger from the other half of the century, late to collect.

  While Bamonte had mixed feelings about the possibility of hastening Ralstin’s death, he was clear on another concern: he did not want the liability on Pend Oreille County. As it was, the county barely had enough money to keep its police cars in gas and antifreeze. Bamonte’s critics were growing. The media attention was a thrill, but when the spotlight passed, Pend Oreille County was left with all the old problems—no jobs, abusive husbands, drunk drivers on winding roads, and a sheriff who chased ghosts.

  “Let this old man die in peace,” Grainey had said. The words bounced along in the front seat with the sheriff as he chugged up pass through the Bitterroots. He had expected Clyde, his prisoner, to be sitting next to him. Instead, he rode home with doubts.

  In all the nights when Bamonte had lain awake in Metaline Falls, his picture of Ralstin had changed very little. He was a tough-nutted, callous-hearted cop who dealt in other people’s secrets, the worst sort of character merchant. The person he had just heard about in Saint Ignatius did not fit the bill. Shielded from the years, protected behind two great mountain walls, Clyde Ralstin was a man ready to have a street named after him, not a convict-in-waiting. He had never killed another human, let alone a cop, his defenders said. Bamonte was used to such dichotomies; the man who would set his family on fire, or lead a posse of neo-Nazis to kill a talk-show host for no other offense than having an opinion, or steal butter from a hungry community, was usually the best of fellows to those who professed to love him. Rare was the newly convicted felon who could not call on a friend or brother to hail him as a good man wronged by the law.